By Geri Laudati
Among the more unique acquisitions of the past few months are twenty-eight ebooks on music and dance. The UW system signed a license with netLibrary (www.netlibrary.com), an online vendor of electronic books, for system-wide access to a collection chosen by selectors at several campuses.
The term eBook applies to published materials, such as reference books, scholarly monographs, and mass market books that have been converted into digital format for electronic distribution. eBooks are much more powerful than traditional books. They are, after all, available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week-- from any location in the world. After locating an eBook online, visitors to netLibrary have the option of viewing or borrowing the eBook. By borrowing an eBook, users will have access to the book during the check-out period of twenty-four hours. eBooks are automatically checked back in to the netLibrary collection when the check-out period expires. So, for example, if you have a need to consult Tia DeNora's Beethoven and the Construction of Genius at 2 a.m., this is for you.
Ay, but there's the rub. netLibrary's technology ensures that only one person can use one eBook copy at a time. Thus, if a library or consortium purchases one copy of one title, then only one person at a time may view that title. When an eBook is checked out, the netLibrary system displays a message indicating that the eBook is not available. We think this is dumb. netLibrary has also developed mechanisms for limiting the copying and printing of eBooks from the Internet. Visitors can copy or print single pages or up to 5000 characters. Alternately, one can download a proprietary viewer that permits reading (although not saving) the material offline. netLibrary's collection for music and dance is limited at present; but such venerable publishers as the University Presses of California, North Carolina, and Pittsburgh have already made available several titles from their catalogs and netLibrary is signing on new publishers at a rapid pace.
One of the most positive features of netLibrary is its full text search, which allows users to search a term across the full texts of the entire library of eBooks. So, although we purchased fewer than thirty music- specific titles, a search on the term "music" returns three hundred titles, some of them interdisciplinary monographs with significant sections about music. With the exception of the few scholarly music/dance monographs available at the time (Pendle's Women & Music, Choreographing History, the aforementioned Beethoven, etc.) much of our selection was of bibliographies. Other campuses seemed to have included high-use popular titles such as The Idiot's Guide to Elvis. Don't blame me. In addition to purchased titles, several public domain classics are included. MadCat will reflect those titles to which we have electronic access.
To use netLibrary, patrons must establish accounts, with user ids and passwords. We are presently watching use carefully to assess whether this is an effective use of materials funds. The idea is one that was waiting to happen and if in the future, we can connect our electronic reserves to netLibrary, we might be able to provide complete texts of course reserve books as we already do for articles.
Electronic journals, on the other hand, have been integrated into the collections quite smoothly and successfully. Increasingly, one is able to find full text electronic access to at least the most recent years of several important titles. Many of these are available in conjunction with indexes such as Academic Search, International Index to Music Periodicals, International Index to the Performing Arts, ProQuest Humanities Research Library, and others. Some journals, such as Organised Sound and other Cambridge University Press titles, are available to subscribers with or without paper editions. Still others, such as Music Theory Online, exist only in electronic format. And while the academic-community-sponsored Jstore and Project Muse currently contain no music journals, the Music Library Association has been active in identifying titles for future inclusion.
Unlike the eBooks of netLibrary, articles in electronic journals can be read by more than one reader at a time and can be printed, saved, or emailed in their entirety. Also, certain vendors have already given us permission to use persistent links to articles needed for electronic reserves, which will save our having to scan and convert those titles.
A list of electronic journal titles and holdings in music and dance can be found on our web page, under Resources and Collections, at www.library.wisc.edu/libraries/Music/rescoll/ejours.htm. A more general list can be found at www.library.wisc.edu/journals/ejournals, where one can search by title or broad subject category, such as Arts & Humanities, Area Studies, etc. Again, MadCat records for each journal reflect the existence of an electronic version and permit users to connect directly.
Finally, the Grove family of publications is competing actively in the electronic publishing arena. A Grove Dictionary of Science (of all things!) has been announced, joining the arts titles we have come to rely on. The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (www.groveopera.com/operaonline) and the New Grove Dictionary of Art (www.groveart.com/tdaonline/index.asp) have been available online to the UW community since January. The electronic version of Grove II, the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, is scheduled to be released late in 2000. These and other full text reference resources useful to music researchers can be found by choosing the "Reference, Encyclopedias, Dictionaries and more" pick at www.library.wisc.edu.